I’d rather be surfing

I don’t know how it comes up but I often find myself talking bragging about the Bacon of the Month Club. My gal got me this “gift that keeps on giving the whole year” [quote from X-mas Vacation] for Christmas 2005. Every month of 2006, I looked forward to getting the insulated package of artisan bacon.

I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a gift for the bacon lover in their family.

BTW: It looks like some delicious looking gourmet bacon is available at Amazon.

Nintendo’s hit console, the Wii, was/is available from Amazon this morning. Not sure how long they will be available. Does this mean the supply of Wii (is that plural too) is finally catching up with demand? Maybe. I bought two just in case…

Update: 9:52am
Looks like it’s already sold out.  Crazy.

Another great post by Marc Andreessen about founding a startup. As usual great insight but I loved the closing metaphor for a startup — the asteroid field scene from the Star Wars Trilogy — and it happens to include one of the best all-time movie lines.

Lolcats is one of those internet crazes that just can’t be explained nor described in words. You just have to see it to understand. Go to I Can Has Cheezburger for more.

Like every internet craze, Lolcats will never die but will instead be relegated further and further down the longtail.

What is unique about Lolcats, though, is that it is probably the first net craze that has its own programming language: LOLCODE. Here’s the LOLCODE Hello World:


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE


Awesome!

I am a social networking laggard.

Myspace
I never joined Myspace, although my girlfriend has been a member pre-Fox.  I could never do it because it is just so damn ugly and slow…  It’s just a piece of shit and my aesthetic side forced me to stay away.

LinkedIn
A VC invited me to join LinkedIn but I probably would have joined it soon enough.  LinkedIn is actually very useful.  Business is all about networking.  Is 59 connections good or bad?

Facebook
I just recently joined Facebook but only because I wanted to play with the API.  Now all of my college friends are asking me to befriend them.  I guess its kind of cool but I haven’t gotten into it.  Maybe I need to build an app.

Last.fm
And I just joined Last.fm because of the side benefit of learning about new bands.  I’d known about them for years — a friend an I found them back in 2005 when they were first starting and we were thinking about starting a music focused business — but never actually used their recommendation service until recently.  Now I am all about the scrobbler.

Major League Baseball is apparently generating $400M in revenue a year from their internet business unit BAM (Baseball Advanced Media).  MLB teams play a combined 2500+ games a year giving BAM a huge amount of content to monetize.  I guess it is not surprising to see that they do have a mobile portal located at http://m.mlb.com.

Not everything is rosey, however.  This unit has been criticized for claiming ownership over the facts of the game and for claiming SlingBox violates copyright.

I love the Seinfeld American Express commercials.

Interesting user-generated marketing campaign out of American Express. The Members Project caught my eye when Martin Scorsese appeared on the TV commercial.

The idea is simple, for every AmEx cardmember who signs up for the Members Project, AmEx will pledge one dollar to fund the winning Members Project idea. Eligible funding is capped at 5 million.

BTW, you can’t participate unless you are a card-carrying member (not of the ACLU either) and located in the US.

Looking into it a bit more…

To be eligible for $1-5M you must write a minimum of 1000 characters (not words, characters!) but no more than 2000 characters! Depending on the final “members” and your effort, each character could be worth up to $5000! $5000 per key press to fund your idea! This sentence would be worth $185000! (Gives a new meaning to weird conversions.)

My new wordpress theme is a bit scribbish… Nice, clean, simple yet stylish - kinda like me! ;-)

Robot Co-op has a great Ruby/Rails library.  I am thinking about using their page fragement memcache library for a project I am working on.  There are some other cool projects that I definitely want to check out when I have a chance…  Especially the CachedModel library